GEE 230 Intro to Engineering Leadership & Management

Employers are looking for leaders with technical skills not just great engineers!

Why do you need strong leadership skills?

– Increases your job opportunities

– Increases your advancement potential

– Increases your pay

– Increases your job satisfaction

When will you need leadership skills?

– Senior class project

– Summer internship

– Day one in your first engineering job

– Your last day on the job when you retire

– Every day in between

You may be thinking:

“I wasn’t born a leader, I’m scr~#ed!!!!!” But have no fear leadership is a learned skill just like second-order differential equations, except a lot easier, way more fun, and a skill that you will use EVERY DAY. [Note: I guarantee that you will not be using second-order differential equations every day of your engineering career. I’m sure that this makes 99.9999999% of you very happy.]

How do you learn leadership skills?

Take GEE230Introduction to Engineering Leadership and Management. This is a one-credit course where you learn and practice leadership skills. There are two different sections on Mondays: 1:00-1:50 PM and 2:00-2:50 PM

Who teaches the course?

Yours truly, Dana Humphrey, Dean of Engineering [Note: you don’t get extra points for taking a course from the dean, but sometimes it helps to know the boss.]

What will you learn in GEE230?

– Difference between leadership and management

– How not to be a seagull manager [Note: seagull managers fly in, make lots of noise, craps on everyone, and then fly out]

– Your leadership style

– How to lead people with different personalities, needs, and skill levels

– How to motivate people (and it is a lot more than just $$$!)

– Effective one-to-one communication

– How to make good decisions

– How to use intuition to make decisions [Note: you can’t get all the answers you need by plugging numbers into an equation or developing a flow chart with eight million branches. It is also not acceptable to just make a SWAG – scientific wild ass guess.]

– Team building

– Professional responsibility and ethics

As part of this course you will also get to meet some great engineering leaders.